West Virginia's Democratic governor Joe Manchin is extremely popular in his state but is still trailing the Republican in his Senate race, because it's 2010. What to do? Maybe go into the woods and shoot climate-change bills, with a rifle?

In the genre of "desperate Democrats using guns and war-talk to show they're not little sissies," this one isn't half bad — even though the imagery gives the impression that, if elected, Joe Manchin will go to Washington and murder everyone with guns. Which is certainly a winning message for 2010! But rather gory, also.

And while shooting a physical copy of your party's energy plan with a rifle may be a fairly strong way of saying, "I will not support a cap-and-trade carbon emissions bill," it's not an unusual stance for a coal-country West Virginia Democrat to take. It's actually a no-brainer. Because in West Virginia politics, there are candidates who violently oppose cap-and-trade, and then there are candidates who lose. And poor Joe Manchin could break the mold and become both this year, if he doesn't shoot up enough piles of paper in the next three weeks.